Saturday, March 23, 2013

Ok, maybe not THE President, as the White House
Office of Public Affairs continues to ignore my requests for a one-on-one
interview with Mr. Obama. But we’ve got the next best thing here on this Lazy
Sunday, as the Indians media relations people are much more accommodating than
those at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Indians team president Mark Shapiro was
gracious enough to take about 45 minutes out of his extremely busy day on
Friday to sit down and talk to me here in beautiful Goodyear, AZ. I really
enjoyed our conversation, and he was very open and forthcoming with every
question I asked him (as you’ll see). The following is the (lightly edited)
text of our interview, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Al:
Pretty exciting offseason for you guys, huh? I’ve been an Indians fan since I
was born, and this is the most active offseason I can ever remember.

Mark: Yeah, if you define active by spending money.
This is my 22nd season with the team, and there’s never been
anything of this magnitude. It’s clearly both a statement and effort by
ownership. This isn’t just a front office effort. We identify players, make
recommendations and provide alternative plans and they ultimately make the
decisions. With both Swisher and Bourn, Paul Dolan was extremely involved and
assertive in our efforts to get those players.

Al:
Talking about the front office, what exactly does the team president do? Half
business and half baseball? Or more of an 80/20 ratio?

Mark: I think that fluctuates by the calendar. I’ve
spent 17, 18 years in baseball ops with the Indians, I’m familiar with every
aspect of it and had involvement with it from the farm system, which I ran, and
it’s largely systematically still the same. Ross Atkins was both a player and a
front office guy when I was here, a lot of the staff are the staff that were
here, so I’ve got a comfort level and a familiarity and a confidence with our
baseball operations staff that I can get out for 3 or 4 days, and get back in
very quickly. My office is right next to Chris’, and it’s rare that he and I
are not talking baseball and I’m still watching the games the same way. But I
would say that a greater portion of my energy and time are spent on the
business side because I’m still learning that side to an extent. It’s all new
to me, it all reports to me and I feel responsible and accountable and it’s a
big challenge. That and the MLB would be a third portion. I’m attending
ownership meetings, I’m on a few committees that the Commissioner has put me on
which has been an incredible education and learning process for me. So it really
is a job that provides a global perspective of the game, from the MLB
perspective to a baseball operations perspective to a business operations
perspective. I’m in a leadership capacity in all three of those roles and enjoy
those roles and after 21 years in the game I’m still learning a ton. I’m still
trying to surround myself with smart, talented people who challenge me and make
me better. And I’m able to stay in the same place which I clearly have strong
roots, strong ties, strong bond with; raising my family there which means a lot
to me, it really does.

Al:
Yeah, you’ve been a Cleveland guy for your whole career. Most guys have to get
moved out of an organization to get promoted.

Mark: Yeah, it’s a rare thing. I’d always thought
that would happen, but it never happened that way and I feel extremely fortunate
to spend my career here.

Al:
Talking about the signings of Swisher and Bourn, you look at last offseason and
at a guy like Josh Willingham. He was a 32-year old outfielder coming off of a
very similar offensive season to Nick Swisher this year. Why Swisher this year
and not Willingham last year?

Mark: Well, we offered within the parameters that we
were expected to operate, and we actually offered Willingham more money on an
annual basis than he signed for. We just didn’t feel comfortable with the risk
when it was spread over that many years. A lot of what we do is risk based,
we’re managing risk. We understand a little too well what a long-term contract
can do to us when it’s not performing, and we get nervous about age and defense
and what those things mean for a player. Obviously he had a career year in the
first year of that contract, so hindsight is 20-20. But Swisher has defensive
value at outfield and first base, two areas where we need help. He’s an average
to plus defender, and we felt like there’s value that offsets the decline if he
does decline over the contract because he provides value at first base and
outfield, and provides us with versatility that we’ve already demonstrated by
signing Bourn. But again, the situations were different. If ownership had
decided last winter that it was critical for us to make a sign, then Willingham
may have been a guy we overextend on. Again, we make recommendations and assess
risk. We provide those in a context of what we’re given to operate under. Both
Swisher and Bourn were outside of our original expectations of how we’ve
operated, and ownership just stepped up and said we want these guys. It’s
important to get them signed for us as a franchise, for our fans. These were
really ownership-based decisions; not personnel wise, there were still the
baseball people making the personnel selections and providing the analysis, but
ownership said that even thought you might be scared about an extra year, we
want the guy.

Al:
Looking back at your history with the Indians, very few long-term contracts to
free agents. You’ve bought out some arbitration years and bought out some free
agent years, but haven’t really brought in a guy for a 4-5 year deal who’s
clear of arbitration. And when you have given out long-term contracts, you’ve
been bitten by it like with Hafner.

Mark: Yeah, those weren’t even long-term, but they
were 2nd generation contracts. And with both Hafner and Westbrook it
didn’t work out. I think the reality is that anytime you’re signing a player who’s
past his prime, more than 29 years old, the risk is just going to go up. No
forecasting or modeling we had ever could have guessed that Hafner was going to
go through injury issues like that.

Al:
And now with Kipnis and Brantley, you’re going through the same thing, looking
to buy out arbitration years and free agency. Is that a continuation of the
John Hart strategy that worked so well back in the 90’s?

Mark: Yeah, we did it with Carlos Santana and
Asdrubal last year, and of course I was involved with John and Dan back in that
initial set. Different parameters back then, we did it wholesale for everybody.
We did it with Dave Otto, Scott Scudder, everyone. We were able to insure every
contract back then, which we can’t do now which made a big difference. So it’s
a little bit different today than it was then. That being said, it’s still
something that we’re going to explore with what we feel are core players. It’s
always about sharing risk. Do they think that the potential risk of leaving
money on the table is worth the benefit of some certainty of financial
security? For us it’s asking if having the fixed cost, a cost we can manage, we
can plan around, is that worth the potential for injury that creates a mismatch
in value.

Al:
Looking at the new collective bargaining agreement, there are caps on draft
spending, caps on international spending. Does that sort of thing help or hurt
a team like the Indians?

Mark: That’s a very good question, and a very
difficult question. I would think this; clearly it benefits us from a
standpoint of stopping the largest market teams from exploiting their extreme resources
and just go crazy. While we really feel like there should be some market
considerations within amateur player acquisition, anything that limits our
intellectual creativity, anything that limits our freedom of choice is probably
a bad thing for us. So we need to be able to feel that year to year we can deploy
more resources there and less in free agency. The bottom line is this; we’re
always going to lose in major league free agency. Our chances to compete are
going to be in a rare opportunity like with Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn
where the biggest market clubs for some reason are not playing. Because they
can always go an extra year, they can always go an extra $5 million. In amateur
acquisition that discrepancy isn’t as great. So if we decided that we wanted to
go heavy there, deploy more resources there, the freedom to do that would
probably be better for us. But I still think the changes that were made are an
incremental step in the right direction. It’s going to take more than one CBA
to get it further. I accept the fact that there’s not a whole lot more revenue
sharing coming, but I’d like to see more market consideration mixed in to the
amateur talent selection process.

Al:
With the steps to cap the spending in the draft and international market, do
you ever see a salary cap in baseball?

Mark: That’s more of a labor-related issue. I guess
I don’t really foresee that happening. It’s hard to get to that point. I think
that something very dramatic or catastrophic would have to happen to get to
that point.

Al: With all of the TV contracts coming
out, not just the major league deal that gives money to all teams but when you
look at teams like Anaheim getting $150 million a season; can the Indians hope
to compete with teams that are getting that much money just from TV revenue?

Mark: Yeah, and the Dodgers. The national money
helps, but it helps everyone the same way so it doesn’t really provide us with
a competitive advantage. The Fox Sports deal will give us a little more. But
the magnitude of the television deals probably point to the greatest challenge
within constructing teams in major league baseball. Where there’s greater
revenue sharing than there’s ever been, while there is an effort to achieve
competitive balance, under the current structure the extreme market disparities
in size, population and wealth the nature of the system is going to create some
large swings in payroll. And there’s a direct correlation from payroll to the
expectancy to get into the playoffs. Not to go deep in the playoffs
necessarily, but to get in and to sustain it. I think you’ll still see well-run
small and mid-market teams have a chance to cycle in and win; maybe even win a
World Series. What you’ll have a difficult time seeing, unless Tampa Bay proves
to be the first, is to see a small-market team that can sustain it. And it
still causes some pain for a fan base, you still can’t keep players. Carl
Crawford, B.J. Upton, James Shields, they’re making tough trades. They just
happen to do a good job when they make those trades and have a talent influx.
In every study there’s a direct correlation between size of payroll and chance
to get into the playoffs.

Al:
Changing gears a little here, having talked to players, fans and reporters
around the team, they all say that this is a different team with Terry Francona
here. His leadership has already had such a profound effect on the club. Can
you talk a little bit about the effect Terry has had on this franchise already?

Mark: We’re always looking for the moves that we can
make that are levers, moves that will impact more than one player. Manager is
one of those moves, it can impact the culture, the attitude and the energy of
the team. Tito’s a guy that both has the confidence of having achieved the
ultimate within the game, the passion for the game that comes from just being a
baseball lifer and having the game running through his blood, as well as an
appreciation and desire to be here, which I think is extremely important for
us. This is a guy who wants to be here, that appreciates Cleveland, that has a
history with Cleveland. He appreciates our culture because he has a history and
a bond with our culture having worked with me and Chris. I think that resonates
and has an impact throughout our entire organization. Not just players; it has
an impact on our scouts, on our player development staff, on our front office.
His energy, his attitude has been infectious. It has rubbed off on everyone,
and that’s been a neat aspect of this camp.

Al:
It’s always great when you can bring in guys like Francona and Swisher who are
not only talented, but they are Ohio guys. They get the fanbase.

Mark: Right. I think those two moves were moves that
really…I mean, watching Nick Swisher yesterday in the dugout, and he never
stopped talking. He’s talking to the fans, he’s talking to the players, and
it’s in a meaningless spring training game. On April 12th when it’s
37 degrees out and there’s 10,000 people in the stands, he’s going to be
talking the same way. So if you want to know what leadership can mean, what
energy can mean; when it’s tough for guys to get up, when they’re cold, tired,
when there’s not a lot of energy coming from the stands, he’s still going to
provide that. So again, when you’re looking at levers that exist that can
impact more than one player, that’s one of them.

Al:
Going back to the 2012 draft, the first draft in the new system with the new
rules on spending; how do you think you did? Was there a strategy going in on
how to save money in some areas and spend it in others?

Mark: I think our strategy wasn’t too different from
a lot of other teams. We looked at what would be available at different picks,
and if we didn’t think that the allotted amount for the pick justified the pick
then we tried to use that money elsewhere in the draft. Try to get more
leverage to convince a guy to sign that might not be inclined to sign for slot.
We tried to be creative within the framework of the system, much as the Astros
did and numerous other teams did. Early returns, I think we had a good draft. I
think that sometimes people don’t understand the value of the top 4 or 5 picks
is very different from 8, 9, 10 or 15. History would say that when you get one
of those top-5 picks you really have a chance to get a player who can make an
impact. After that, you’re more hoping to get a major league player, or really
hit on something later in the draft. You feel good about it after draft day,
but it really takes 4 or 5 years to analyze the quality of a draft. I feel like
we had a good understanding of the system and our guys did a great job walking
through mock drafts, simulations, negotiations, trying to get a feel for how it
would go. I don’t think we were surprised by anything. We largely executed our
strategy. This year will be an important year for us.

Al:
Yeah, I noticed a little glint in your eye when you were talking about how a
top-5 pick can impact a team, with you having the 5th overall pick
this year.

Mark: (Laughing) Yes, this year will be an extremely
important first round pick for us.

Al:
Sticking with the minors, looking at the organization holistically you see a
lot of high upside, athletic middle infielders. Lindor, Ramirez, Wolters,
Rodriguez, Paulino; those are traditionally the tougher players to get. It’s
usually easier to find a 1B or a LF. Is that an organizational strategy to go
and load up on MI?

Mark: Yeah, the system is weak on corner players. We
probably said years ago that Latin America would be a good place to go get
middle infielders. But it’s not really a conscious effort; we look to get the
best talent we can. I think it’s unrealistic that all of those guys are going
to make it as middle infielders. One of those guys is going to get too big and
end up as a third baseman or an outfielder, but we’ll keep them in the middle
as long as we can. We’ll find ways of getting all of them at bats, and if one
of them plays their way off middle infield then that’s fine, we need corner
players too. They still have to become guys who are productive and hit enough
and if they’re all middle guys then we have assets that we can find corner guys
with. It’s still too far away to say where they’ll all end up.

Al:
Trevor Bauer was another big acquisition for a team that is light in the upper
minors when it comes to starting pitching prospects. Is there even such a thing
as a starting pitching prospect, having gone through it with guys like Adam
Miller and Jason Knapp?

Mark: Yeah, I think there is. I think we’ve got a
better understanding of things like deliveries and mechanics, things that keep
guys healthy. It’s still not a science, it’s still an area that’s in
development but I do think we’ve done a ton of work on it and I think we’re
better at understanding those things. Bauer is a guy who, because of four tough
starts in the big leagues and an organization with a lot of depth in that area,
we were able to find a unique opportunity to acquire a high-ceiling starter.
That draft, if it ends up netting us Trevor Bauer and Lindor, we’ve got two
players that we feel good about today. So I hope I’m saying the same thing to
you three or four years from now when we’re sitting here talking about multi-year
deals for those guys, but we’re very excited about them and think that both of
those guys can be building-block guys that you can really build a team around.

Al:
Talking about studying the delivery and mechanics, Trevor Bauer is one of the
most dedicated students to the craft and art of pitching that you’re ever going
to find. Have you had a chance to sit down and talk with him about pitching?

Mark: Yeah, Chris and Tito went down to visit him at
the Texas baseball ranch where he works out, and I’ve had a chance to talk with
him up here. He’s a guy who’s highly intellectual, he’s highly aware of what
makes him successful, he’s aware of what will keep him healthy which is an
asset but can also be a challenge. This is a game where if you over-intellectualize
it can work against you, because there’s just so much failure built in. I think
he’s going to have to learn to selectively use that intellect that he’s got.
He’s clearly a smart guy and clearly aware of what makes him successful and
he’s clearly applied a lot of those things to both his delivery and his level
of preparation. I think we choose to see it as an asset more than anything
else.

Al:
Do you think you were able to get him at a bit of a discount because of that
rough MLB debut? Choo is obviously a good player, but…

Mark: I think two things happened; one, their
(Arizona’s) organization has Corbin, Skaggs, Bradley, a lot of young pitching. They
have the ability to make a trade from depth. And two, they may have been
colored by his interactions there, his poor major league debut. But I look at
the fact that it was his first year of pro ball, and he had unbelievable AA and
AAA numbers which guys don’t just go to AA and AAA and dominate like that in
their first year. If you throw out the four major league starts, we probably
don’t have a chance to sniff getting the guy.

Al:
What is the most challenging aspect of building a championship level roster in
Cleveland?

Mark: I think just the resources. The combination of
resources and MLB structure. We’re competing against Detroit, whose average
payroll is going to be well over $100 million and even with the steps we’ve
made to put us in the high $80’s we’re still operating at a disadvantage. How
that impacts decisions, how that impacts the ability to retain players, that’s
still probably the greatest challenge. It’s an emotional challenge too, but I
think the day that you view that as insurmountable, the day you view that as
colossal is the day that it becomes an excuse instead of a challenge. From a
leadership perspective it’s never a question of “can we,” it’s just a question
of “how do we?” And there are examples of teams that are doing it well. So we
just have to design our systems, we have to make our decisions, we have to
align our processes to overcome those challenges. But it’s clear that’s the
single biggest challenge. It’s a combination of the size of the market and the
system that’s in place to share revenue. The revenue is largely predicated on
the number of human beings that live in the market, and the wealth and
corporations. The number of tickets purchased is directly proportional to the
number of people that live there. I’m confident that there are more baseball
fans, percentage wise, in Cleveland than in New York City. But if the % of
baseball fans that come to the games in Cleveland is a little higher than the %
of fans in New York that go to games, it doesn’t matter because there are just
so many more people there. So it effects the number of tickets purchased, how
much you can charge for tickets, the number of corporations that buy suites,
sponsorship and the number of executives that buy tickets. All of those things
are more of a challenge in baseball because of the system that baseball uses.

Al:
The Royals did something before the 2012 season that I thought was pretty neat,
they had a “prospect all-star game” before the season started. Would the
Indians ever do something like that?

Mark: We talked a lot about playing minor league
games there, but haven’t really been able to set it up. The Red Sox have done
it, the Orioles have done it, but I think we’re cognizant of the fact that
you’d be serving a very hard-core, small % of our fans with something like
that. It’s not something that we’d get a huge turnout for. We just know that
based on experience, based on how those teams draw, how our team draws and how
these things work. I think it’d be fun for us, I think it’d be fun for a small
group of our minor league fans, but really just for our hard core fans.

Mark: We don’t have to be quite as secretive on the
business side, we’re not competing against teams for marketing dollars. I hired
Alex (King), and there are things in the business side that I find directly
analogous to the baseball side. There’s an opportunity there for better
decision making by utilizing decision-making and information. What makes it
analogous to baseball is that while there is data and there is objective
analysis, there’s still a subjective component to it, still a feel to it.
You’re still dealing with human beings who are making decisions, you’re dealing
with marketing. You can’t just spit out a definitive answer. But what I do
think you want to do, just like when making a baseball operations decision, is
that you want the best information possible. You want to have the smartest
people help you bring that information to light in a way that you can apply it
and execute it in a series of decisions that set up a strategy and make up a
plan. I think that the business sides of professional sports organizations
often are reactive to the performance of the team. They maximize revenue when
the team is doing well and then they just try to hunker down and survive when
the team is not doing well. The magnitude of our challenge has made us ask what
else can we do and how do we know that we’re performing as well as possible on
the business side regardless of team performance. That’s what we’ve tried to
figure out. It’s a very tough question, and clearly the biggest lever and the
most important area of focus will always be team performance. But what we want
to know on the business side is how we can soften the valleys and heighten the
peaks as far as revenue. And we build that bond with the fans by knowing our
fans extremely well we build a stronger bond that’s more resilient.

Al:
Do you still use proprietary statistics in the organization?

Mark: I’ll say this; when it comes to making
decisions we want the best information possible. Analysis and statistics are
one part of that. Seven or eight years ago we had one person who did it full
time and now we have five people who do it full time. We have an analytics
department. A big part of that department is just data management. There’s so
much data to manage generate by every single pitch in the major leagues. It’s
partly analysis, and it’s partly getting the information to Chris and Mike (Chernoff)
so that they can make an efficient decision without getting bogged down in the
statistics. So there’s multiple layers of how you use statistics and use
information. That being said, I’ll also tell you that we have a never-ending
thirst for the best information. Subjectively, from scouting, psychologically
or mentally, financially or economically; we want the best information
available on these guys in every single variable that exists going into a
decision. And that’s the job of the front office, so we have a thirst to
acquire the best information possible.

Al:
Is there an example of a player where traditional stats like OPS say one thing
but your proprietary stats tell you something different?

Mark: Not OPS, but maybe RBI’s and batting average.
The utilization of information is always about finding inefficiency in the
market. They’re going to constantly close, and when you do find one you’ve got
to be constantly on the lookout for the next one. Because they’re very
momentary, and you have to take advantage of them. Where’s the value at any one
moment in time, and are you prepared and able and nimble enough to execute and
make a decision on them.

Al:
Well, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me, as I know you’re really
busy here in the lead-up to the regular season. I really appreciate it, and
good luck this year.

10 comments:

Cord Phelps has looked much stronger to me since his call up last year. Is there a fair chance he's a second division starter? Is there a place for him on this roster as long as Kipnis is healthy, or is he still more valuable parked in Columbus as depth?

Has any starter, at any level, had a particularly noteworthy camp? All the news on that front has looked like "eh" to me.

Santana's defense is a perpetual concern of mine, moreso now that the team will carry a near fulltime DH in Reynolds. Can Carlos manage a full season behind the plate?

Great interview, Al. Thanks for linking to the BP article, that is some very cool stuff.

It is crazy that the tribe has been able to keep basically the same management line in place for the past 20 years. When you compare this to the garbage the Browns have been putting out there since '99, the Dolans do deserve a great deal of respect. Now if only the CC and CLee trades had worked out...

another good article Al. You touched on it briefly with Shapiro about the imbalance in baseball. I would like to know if Baseball would ever realize that baseball is the product. The cities in which the game is played is nothing more than a franchise outlet of the product. All monies made by the franchise should be shared equally with alll teams. In football the share all of the TV money equally as it shoud be as football is the product.

Thanks for this, Al. It's delightful to read an interview that starts from this level of understanding of the Indians system (knows the middle infield depth in MiLB, the draft strategy, &c.). You really got answers that cut beneath the obvious, and it was great to hear Indians' management talk about their player acquisition strategy and how they work within the financial constraints they face. I'm ready for some baseball!

PS. What the hell was the above commenter talking about? Your questions were not only excellent, they were based on a deeper understanding of the Indians' system than a fan could even get from reading the PD.

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